It's not a refurb so why is it "only" $349? I don't know much about the EVGA line - along with the FTW edition they seem to have quite a few others. Maybe the "Classified" is one of the weaker sisters?

Anyway thanks for any thoughts or info you can share. I've done all the googling I can stand for now...

oh wow really? (thanks for your quick reply btw). That's exactly what I wanted to hear...but I always thought the FTW was their "top-of-the-line" model...

edit: my reason for wanting a 580 is to more than double my VRAM and more important to get higher memory throughput, which apparently is what makes the Adobe apps happy - all on a CUDA-enabled card. The 470 I have pushes 133MB/s at stock, 140 with a 10% OC. The 580 will do 192MB/s (200+ with a tiny OC) and that seems like a healthy upgrade to me.

Last edited by canoli on Sun Nov 25, 2012 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It's more a case of other GTX580s being very overpriced, rather than that EVGA one being a particularly great deal. You can get a GTX670 for the same price, and the GTX670 completely blows away the GTX580 while using less power. They aren't even in the same league:

Everything I've read about Kepler tells me it's not nearly as good at compute tasks as the 500-series Fermi. For gaming it's awesome - like you said, better frame rates while using less power. But for everything else the 580 checks out better than Kepler.

"The GTX 680’s larger number of SMXes and higher clockspeed cause the GTX 670 to fall behind by 10%, performing worse than the GTX 570 or even the GTX 470 (emphasis mine). More so than any other test, this is the test that drives home the point that GK104 isn’t a strong compute GPU while AMD offers nothing short of incredible compute performance."

Too bad Adobe and AMD aren't on speaking terms...or we'd have seen the Adobe apps ported over to OpenCL years ago. As it is it's the green team for me.

Yeah I just assumed you were going to be using it for gaming, since that's what about 99% of people do with their video cards. If you are solely concerned about compute the GTX580 is probably better. They are closer than I would have expected even in compute though. If someone did a mix of gaming and compute I would probably still lean towards the 670.

no doubt there's a lot to like about Kepler; adaptive v-sync is getting a lot of good reviews ...not to mention finally able to run 3 (even 4) displays off 1 card...the "boost clock" seems pretty cool too (though I see some 580 specs show that as well - not sure why, I didn't think Fermi had a boost clock).

Adobe seems to be playing well with the green team for a lot of things.

We had a mix of GTX285 and GTX470 machines in the visualisation department, so I dumped a couple of 7970's on them. For whatever reason they pestered the living crap out of me until I ordered four more. They're heavy 3DS Max users, but they were so keen to point out that Photoshop was running "better than they'd ever seen it running before" and that Premiere was doing well too.

If Adobe have CUDA-specific apps, they'll need to be something special to run faster than a 7970 without, because CUDA optimisations or not, Kepler is massively less powerful than Tahiti for compute operations.

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Adobe seems to be playing well with the green team for a lot of things.

We had a mix of GTX285 and GTX470 machines in the visualisation department, so I dumped a couple of 7970's on them. For whatever reason they pestered the living crap out of me until I ordered four more. They're heavy 3DS Max users, but they were so keen to point out that Photoshop was running "better than they'd ever seen it running before" and that Premiere was doing well too.

If Adobe have CUDA-specific apps, they'll need to be something special to run faster than a 7970 without, because CUDA optimisations or not, Kepler is massively less powerful than Tahiti for compute operations.

Concerning non-gaming uses of a video card, you're absolutely 100% correct canoli, there is a 'catch': it's not as good as similarly priced cards when measured in games in relation to the 6xx series, and this 'catch' isn't relevant to your uses. It just so happens that the 6xx series really sucks for what you want to use it for, but you already did your research and knew that, this is a good buy for you. Snatch it before it's gone.

Yes that's true, i've heard there has been some slow movement toward OpenCL but i haven't researched it enough to know how extensive the support is in PremPro. Adobe only certifies NVIDIA cards at this point, though there's a simple hack to make other NVIDIA cards take advantage of the so-called Mercury Playback Engine.

Just one more thing to consider...according to this review it is quite noisy. No hard figures due to their testing methods, but you can check other reviews as well. This might not matter to you but at least you'll know.

yep you're right - AMD would be the better deal - and reading up on the OpenCL and Adobe it looks like they're making faster headway than I thought. But so far Adobe is still concentrating their energies around CUDA - rendering times with and without are like night and day. So for now...just have to wait.